The concerning numbers announced by the UN Children's Fund warned on Thursday that weather disasters brought on by climate change—including floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires—caused 43.1 million child displacements between 2016 and 2021 and criticised the lack of attention given to victims.
Co-author Laura Healy told AFP that the statistics only indicated the "tip of the iceberg," with many more potentially affected, in an in-depth study on the subject that included the heartbreaking stories of some of the children affected.
Siblings Mia and Maia Bravo sat in the back of the family minivan in 2017 as flames engulfed their caravan in California.
"I was afraid, in shock," Maia says in the report. "I would stay up all night."
The age of the victims is typically not taken into consideration in statistics on internal displacement brought on by climate disasters.
According to the report, 43.1 million children were uprooted from their homes between 2016 and 2021 as a result of four different types of climatic disasters (floods, storms, droughts, and wildfires), which have become more frequent as a result of global warming.
Ninety-five per cent of those relocating were brought on by storms and floods.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, a non-governmental organisation, and UNICEF collaborated to analyse the data and uncover the hidden toll on children.
"It's the equivalent of about 20,000 child displacements every day."
Healy told AFP, highlighting how the afflicted children run the risk of experiencing additional traumas like being separated from their parents or becoming a target of child traffickers.
The numbers reflect the number of displacements rather than the number of children affected, as one child may be uprooted more than once
The statistics do not distinguish between children who were forced to leave after a disaster and those who were evacuated in advance of a weather event.
Additionally, Healy claims that the number of displaced people as a result of drought is "radically underreported" since they are less sudden and more difficult to calculate.
"This is just the tip of the iceberg based on the available data that we have," she said. "The reality is with the impacts of climate change, or better tracking of displacement when it comes to slow onset events that the number of children who are uprooted from their homes is going to be much greater."
(Photo: UNICEF/Prinsloo)
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